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Sunday, June 8, 2014

Tonight’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ Is Its Most Expensive Episode, Ever

MTV
by alicia lutes 06/08/14

We’re already way excited for tonight’s brand new episode of “Game of Thrones” — The Watchers on The Wall. But when you take into consideration the fact that this is the series’ most expensive hour to date? Well, now we can barely sit still.

In an interview with Access Hollywood, Jon Snow’s real-life counterpart Kit Harington, explained the episode is “as big as Thrones has gone at the moment. I mean, I think it’s no secret that it’s the most expensive episode that they’ve ever made and a lot of that is due to the CGI.” (Though to be fair, Jon Snow knows nothing, so take that with a grain of salt.)

The series’ showrunners, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, confirmed as such going over the details of the episode with Entertainment Weekly, even noting that episode touts both “the biggest green screen in Europe” and “the biggest Styrofoam piece in existence.”

“It’s a very intense episode, more intense than ‘Blackwater,’” said Benioff.

Weiss added: “With ‘Blackwater’ when we got the episode in, so much of it was visual effects dependent we were kind of unsure — the performances were fantastic and the action was great, but we weren’t entirely sure what we had until the pieces were put together. But with this, … just something about it really grabbed us by the neck [and] that’s very rare even with the great directors we’re fortunate to work with.”

The grand scale of the episode is likely what caused it to have such a mega-budget, thanks to production designer Deborah Riley, who, according to Benioff “did this magnificent top-of-The Wall set, far bigger than what we had before, so you can do walk-and-talks, you can have massive action sequences. It’s completely surrounded by green screen.”